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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 3:15 pm 
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From this year's Macworld conference...
Quote:
One last thing...iTunes has sold more than 6 billion songs in six years. It's the world largest library with 10 million songs. There are 75 million accounts. First new thing is price. Now starting in April, three pricing tiers, there is a 69 cents, a 99 cents and $1.29 price tier. Also, there is more DRM-free music available through iTunes. We're talking 8 million songs and by the end of the quarter, the last 2 million will go DRM free. You can go through library and upgrade it to DRM free. Also, for the iPhone iTunes Music Store, you can now download over 3G, not just Wi-Fi. It's the same selection and price and quality over the cell network. You don't have to be Wi-Fi range to get music. That starts today. And now, we 15-time Grammy award winner Tony Bennett closing out the show with "The best is yet to come."


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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 4:13 pm 
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Trevah just posted this up in the Wanderground viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42480&view=unread#unread

I thought it deserved to be here as well.

Bolgani Gogo wrote:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/iTunes+hikes+download+prices/1150912/story.html

Quote:
The price of the most popular songs on iTunes will increase by 30 per cent, according Apple Inc., vaulting to $1.29 US from 99 cents US.

Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, Philip Schiller, announced the hike Tuesday at the Macworld Expo trade show in San Francisco.

The price for older, less popular songs drop to 69 cents per download, while songs with moderate popularity will remain at 99 cents per track.

The price adjustments were announced after Apple hammered out a deal with Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — three of the world's largest music companies.

The price increase — a departure from Apple's rigid 99 cent-a-song system —could wind up boosting revenue for the major music labels, which had worried Apple was becoming too powerful.

“The vast majority of music is purchased by teenage girls and they tend to buy popular music, and they buy it when it first comes out. So that's going to be the $1.29 music. From that perspective, the music labels are likely to make a little bit more money,” said analyst Van Baker of Gartner Inc., an information technology research and advisory company.

He said Apple also will do well with its 69-cent catalogue, “because that's even more of an impulse purchase than the 99-cent catalogue. So there's a lot of people out there that will backfill their libraries.”

iTunes is now the world's largest seller of music. The online store surpassed retail giant Wal-Mart for the music-selling crown late last year. Apple's music service has more than 50 million customers, and has sold more than four billion songs since its 2001 launch.

The online store, which is designed to work seamlessly with the company's iPod music players, has not adjusted its pricing since it opened.

The industry has been struggling since early 2000, when sharing music over the Internet exploded. That practice caused sales of CDs to slide. Sales of music on disc in Canada have fallen to $704 million in 2006 from $1.3 billion in 1999.

In November, Atlantic Records, which lists Metallica, Kid Rock and Matchbox 20 among its artists, announced that its digital revenues surpassed CD sales for the first time. Analysts believe the music industry will be selling a majority of its offerings in digital format by the end of 2010.

As part of the pricing announcement, Apple also said it would begin selling music without digital restrictions. Until now, music purchased on iTunes could not be copied, and the company has made it difficult to place music purchased through iTunes on any portable device that has not been made by Apple.


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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 10:51 pm 
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I love Music & hate brickwalled audio

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Lossless........?

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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 4:24 pm 
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Puppy Monkey Alan!

Joined: 20 Sep 2006
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Geff R. wrote:
Lossless........?


The only thing the record labels think should be lossless is their profits.

Not really a surprise how this is going to pan out - the labels have been putting pressure on Apple to raise prices. Apple has succeeded where the labels have failed miserably - by creating an online platform that worked and worked well. I'll give Apple credit for at least getting the 69-cent tier created.

Regardless, this isn't going to affect me much because, given the chance, my preference is to buy music in a physical format, then lossless, with MP3s a last resort (or a freebie).

Alan

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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 6:32 pm 
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I love Music & hate brickwalled audio

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alantig wrote:
Geff R. wrote:
Lossless........?


The only thing the record labels think should be lossless is their profits.
Alan


:yay: :yay: :yay:

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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 5:38 pm 
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http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+Tags+DRM ... e13931.htm

Image

Apple Tags DRM-Free iTunes Music, What Did You Expect?

Tom Corelis (Blog) - January 13, 2009 7:54 PM

So Apple dropped the DRM on all of its iTunes offerings. Are pigs flying? Did hell freeze over? This is a huge victory for the online freedom groups, and a potent statement for the long-term infeasibility of restrictive DRM as a whole.

Don’t break out the party champagne just yet, though: DRM is most certainly dead, but that doesn’t mean the music industry has given up. You know the phrase: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

As someone with a long-time fascination with cryptography and steganography – that is, scrambling data or hiding it in an otherwise innocent information, respectively – I’ve always suspected that music offerings from the larger-scale, DRM-free stores like iTunes might have little bits of traceable data hidden somewhere in their product. It’d be remarkably easy: your average music file is at least a couple of megabytes, and an embedded tracking code, account number, or some other beacon need only take a couple dozen bits.

Apple, of course, has done just this: DRM-free iTunes downloads embed the account holder’s e-mail address in each song file, and that embedded data is impossible to edit with normal software.

The purpose of this is simple: providing accountability to the buyer – and presumably, uploader – in the event that a song turns up on a P2P network. We all know what at least a handful of (foolish, in my opinion) people are going to do: “No DRM! Let’s upload it to The Pirate Bay!” I’d bet cold, hard cash on this and I am sure that within the next one or two years someone, somewhere out there is going to be sued because of it.

Of course, I’ve given Apple a little bit too much credit here: a newly-downloaded, non-DRM’d iTunes track contains the downloading account holder’s e-mail address, stored in plain text, buried somewhere in the song file; anyone with a copy of Notepad, a hex editor, or Linux’s strings command can find it – and alter it. No crazy stego here, no sir-ee. Move along, citizen.

Or is it so simple? A plaintext email address, hidden-but-not-really, would be the perfect red herring to divert our attention from other, more sophisticated beacons buried even deeper inside. There are already stego tools out there for MP3 files, and they’re open source – who’s to say that Apple hasn’t adopted those algorithms to work with its format?

The powers that be have invested too much into DRM and copyright control – not to mention the music itself – to simply let things go. Don’t want DRM? Fine – here’s a DRM-free copy of your music, Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukah/Happy Yule/whatever. But don’t think that for a second the big boys have given up.

Look on the bright side: the music data we purchased is now, once again, fully ours. We may not know entirely what is in it, but that can change – I am certainly not the first person to think of this, and I’m sure some very smart people on both sides of the virtual counter are working hard to figure out just what’s up.

Until then, however, I can’t recommend posting your newly-freed tunes online, or handing them out to friends. You never know who’s watching…

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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 5:41 pm 
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Amazon MP3 also embeds the e-mail address.


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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 5:48 pm 
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Mr. IMWANKO

Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 73867
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Linda wrote:
http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+Tags+DRMFree+iTunes+Music+What+Did+You+Expect/article13931.htm

Image

Apple Tags DRM-Free iTunes Music, What Did You Expect?

Tom Corelis (Blog) - January 13, 2009 7:54 PM

So Apple dropped the DRM on all of its iTunes offerings. Are pigs flying? Did hell freeze over? This is a huge victory for the online freedom groups, and a potent statement for the long-term infeasibility of restrictive DRM as a whole.

Don’t break out the party champagne just yet, though: DRM is most certainly dead, but that doesn’t mean the music industry has given up. You know the phrase: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

As someone with a long-time fascination with cryptography and steganography – that is, scrambling data or hiding it in an otherwise innocent information, respectively – I’ve always suspected that music offerings from the larger-scale, DRM-free stores like iTunes might have little bits of traceable data hidden somewhere in their product. It’d be remarkably easy: your average music file is at least a couple of megabytes, and an embedded tracking code, account number, or some other beacon need only take a couple dozen bits.

Apple, of course, has done just this: DRM-free iTunes downloads embed the account holder’s e-mail address in each song file, and that embedded data is impossible to edit with normal software.

The purpose of this is simple: providing accountability to the buyer – and presumably, uploader – in the event that a song turns up on a P2P network. We all know what at least a handful of (foolish, in my opinion) people are going to do: “No DRM! Let’s upload it to The Pirate Bay!” I’d bet cold, hard cash on this and I am sure that within the next one or two years someone, somewhere out there is going to be sued because of it.

Of course, I’ve given Apple a little bit too much credit here: a newly-downloaded, non-DRM’d iTunes track contains the downloading account holder’s e-mail address, stored in plain text, buried somewhere in the song file; anyone with a copy of Notepad, a hex editor, or Linux’s strings command can find it – and alter it. No crazy stego here, no sir-ee. Move along, citizen.

Or is it so simple? A plaintext email address, hidden-but-not-really, would be the perfect red herring to divert our attention from other, more sophisticated beacons buried even deeper inside. There are already stego tools out there for MP3 files, and they’re open source – who’s to say that Apple hasn’t adopted those algorithms to work with its format?

The powers that be have invested too much into DRM and copyright control – not to mention the music itself – to simply let things go. Don’t want DRM? Fine – here’s a DRM-free copy of your music, Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukah/Happy Yule/whatever. But don’t think that for a second the big boys have given up.

Look on the bright side: the music data we purchased is now, once again, fully ours. We may not know entirely what is in it, but that can change – I am certainly not the first person to think of this, and I’m sure some very smart people on both sides of the virtual counter are working hard to figure out just what’s up.

Until then, however, I can’t recommend posting your newly-freed tunes online, or handing them out to friends. You never know who’s watching…


Aw. I was reading this for awhile, and was impressed that someone here at IMWAN
was casually using the word "stego"—slang for steganography—but I see this was a repost.

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 Post subject: iTunes to introduce pricing tiers, more DRM-free music in April 2009
PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 9:56 pm 
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I love Music & hate brickwalled audio

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Posts: 37652
Location: The Pasture
I woukd think that simply converting the mp3 to a .wav file would lose the watermarking; or am I wrong on that?

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